This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Baby deaths: Tragic failures of memory, not failures of love

What kind of person forgets a baby? Brain research shows that just about anyone can.

Miles and Carol Harrison, who had adopted their son from Russia, comfort each other outside Chase's nursery door. Chase died after being left in the back seat of his father's car last summer. (REBECCA DROBIS / THE WASHINGTON POST)

By Gene WeingartenWashington Post Magazine

Sat., March 21, 2009

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table.

In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band.

The room was a sepulchre.

Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept.

He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment. He would not speak at all for the longest time, not until the nurse sank down beside him and held his hand. It was only then that the patient began to open up, and what he said was that he didn't want any sedation, he didn't deserve a respite from pain, he wanted to feel it all and then to die.

Article Continued Below

The charge in the courtroom was manslaughter, brought by the Commonwealth of Virginia.

No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer – beset by problems at work, making call after call on his cellphone – he forgot to drop his son, Chase, at daycare. The toddler slowly sweltered to death, strapped into a car seat for nearly nine hours in an office parking lot in Herndon, Va., in the blistering heat of July.

It was an inexplicable, inexcusable mistake, but was it a crime? That was the question for a judge to decide.

At one point, during a recess, Harrison rose unsteadily to his feet, turned to leave the courtroom and saw, as if for the first time, that there were people witnessing his disgrace. His eyes lowered. He swayed a little until someone steadied him and then he gasped out in a keening falsetto: "My poor baby!"

The trial would last three days.

Sitting through it, side by side in the rear of the courtroom, were two women who had travelled hours to get there. As the most excruciating of the evidence came out, from the medical examiner, Mary – the older, shorter one – trembled. Lyn – the one with the long, strawberry-blond hair – gathered her in, one arm around her shoulder, the other across their bodies, holding hands.

When the trial ended, Lyn Balfour and Mary Parks left quietly, drawing no attention to themselves. They hadn't wanted to be there but they'd felt a duty, both to the defendant and, in a much more complicated way, to themselves.

It was unusual, to say the least: three people together in one place, sharing the same heartbreaking history. All three had accidentally killed their babies in the identical, incomprehensible, modern way.

"Death by hyperthermia" is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine and just forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parcelled out through the spring, summer and early fall.

In Canada, child deaths by hyperthermia – and by hypothermia, extreme cold – are not documented but rarely make the news. Health professionals issue seasonal warning; the emphasis is often on the dangers of leaving pets, not children, in cars.

Two decades ago, infant deaths in cars were relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared passenger-side front airbags could kill children and they recommended child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, the baby seats were pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child... well, what kind of person forgets a baby?

The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized.

Last year in the U.S., it happened three times in one day.

Many are people like Mary Parks of Blacksburg, Va. who drove from her workplace to the daycare centre to pick up the child she thought she had dropped off that morning, never noticing the corpse in the back seat.

At his trial, the court heard how Harrison and his wife had been a late-40s childless couple desperately wanting to become parents and how they had made three visits to Russia to find and adopt their 18-month-old son from an orphanage bed he had seldom been allowed to leave.

Harrison's next-door neighbour testified how she'd watched the new father giddily frolic on the lawn with his son. Harrison's sister testified how she had worked with her brother and sister-in-law for weeks to find the ideal daycare situation for the boy, who would need special attention to recover from the effects of his painfully austere beginnings.

Distraught but composed, Harrison's wife, Carol, described the phone call her husband had made to her right after he'd discovered what he'd done, the phone call she'd fielded on a bus coming home from work. It was, she said, unintelligible screaming.

In the end, Miles Harrison was found not guilty. There was no crime, the judge said. At the verdict, Harrison gasped, sobbed, then tried to stand. But the man had nothing left. His legs buckled and he crashed pathetically to his knees.

David Diamond tries to explain.

"Memory is a machine," he says, "and it is not flawless. Our conscious mind prioritizes things by importance but, on a cellular level, our memory does not. If you're capable of forgetting your cellphone, you are potentially capable of forgetting your child."

Diamond is a professor of molecular physiology at the University of South Florida and a consultant to the veterans hospital in Tampa. His research involves the intersection of emotion, stress and memory. What he has found is that, under some circumstances, the most sophisticated part of our thought-processing centre can be held hostage to a competing memory system, a primitive portion of the brain that is – by a design as old as the dinosaur's – inattentive, pigheaded, nonanalytical, stupid.

Diamond is the memory expert with a lousy memory, the one who recently realized, while driving to the mall, that his infant granddaughter was asleep in the back of the car. He remembered only because his wife, sitting beside him, mentioned the baby. He understands what could have happened had he been alone with the child. Almost worse, he understands exactly why.

The human brain, he says, is a magnificent but jury-rigged device in which newer and more sophisticated structures sit atop a junk heap of prototype brains still used by lower species. At the top of the device are the smartest and most nimble parts: the prefrontal cortex, which thinks and analyzes, and the hippocampus, which makes and holds on to our immediate memories. At the bottom is the basal ganglia, nearly identical to the brains of lizards, controlling voluntary but barely conscious actions.

Diamond says in situations involving familiar, routine motor skills, the human animal presses the basal ganglia into service as a sort of auxiliary autopilot. When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on the way to work, the ignorant but efficient basal ganglia is operating the car; that's why you'll sometimes find yourself having driven from point A to point B without a clear recollection of the route you took, the turns you made or the scenery you saw.

Ordinarily, says Diamond, this delegation of duty "works beautifully, like a symphony. But sometimes, it turns into the 1812 Overture. The cannons take over and overwhelm."

Diamond has found that stress – either sudden or chronic – can weaken the brain's higher-functioning centres, making them more susceptible to bullying from the basal ganglia. He has seen this play out in cases he has followed involving infant deaths in cars.

"The quality of prior parental care seems to be irrelevant," he says. "The important factors that keep showing up involve a combination of stress, emotion, lack of sleep and change in routine, where the basal ganglia is trying to do what it's supposed to do and the conscious mind is too weakened to resist. What happens is that the memory circuits in a vulnerable hippocampus literally get overwritten, like with a computer program. Unless the memory circuit is rebooted – such as if the child cries or, you know, if the wife mentions the child in the back – it can entirely disappear."

Diamond stops.

"There is a case in Virginia where this is exactly what happened, the whole set of stress factors. I was consulted on it a couple of years ago. It was a woman named, ah..."

Lyn Balfour?

"Yeah, Lyn Balfour! The perfect storm."

It's mid-October. Lyn Balfour is on her cellphone, ordering a replacement strap for a bouncy seat for the new baby and, simultaneously, trying to arrange for an emergency sitter, because she has to get to the fertility clinic, pronto, because she just got lab results back and she's ovulating and her husband's in Iraq and she wants to get artificially inseminated with his sperm, like right now but, crap, the sitter is busy, so she grabs the kid and the keys and the diaper bag and is out the door and in the car and gone. But now the baby is fussing, so she's reaching back to give him a bottle of juice, one eye on him and the other on a seemingly endless series of hairpin turns that she negotiates adroitly.

"Actually," she says with a laugh, "I'm getting better about not doing too much at once. I've been simplifying my life a lot."

Raelyn Balfour is the first to admit her temperament contributed to the death of her son, Bryce. On March 30, 2007, she accidentally left the 9-month-old in the parking lot of the Charlottesville judge advocate general's office, where she worked as a transportation administrator. The high temperature that day was only in the 60s but the biometrics and thermodynamics of babies and cars combine mercilessly: Young children have lousy thermostats and heat builds quickly in a closed vehicle in the sun. The temperature in Balfour's car that day topped 110 degrees.

There's a dismayingly cartoonish expression for what happened to Lyn Balfour on March 30, 2007. British psychologist James Reason coined the term the "Swiss Cheese Model" in 1990 to explain through analogy why catastrophic failures can occur in organizations despite multiple layers of defence. Reason likens the layers to slices of Swiss cheese, piled upon each other, five or six deep. The holes represent small, potentially insignificant weaknesses. Things will totally collapse only rarely, he says but when they do, it is by coincidence – when all the holes happen to align so that there is a breach through the entire system.

On the day Balfour forgot Bryce in the car, she had been up much of the night, first babysitting for a friend who had to take her dog to an emergency vet clinic, then caring for Bryce, who was cranky with a cold. Because the baby was also tired, he uncharacteristically dozed in the car, so he made no noise. Because Balfour was planning to bring Bryce's usual car seat to the fire station to be professionally installed, Bryce was positioned in a different car seat that day, not behind the passenger but behind the driver, and was thus not visible in the rear-view mirror. Because the family's second car was on loan to a relative, Balfour drove her husband to work that day, meaning the diaper bag was in the back, not on the passenger seat, as usual, where she could see it. Because of a phone conversation with a young relative in trouble and another with her boss about a crisis at work, Balfour spent most of the trip on her cell, stressed, solving other people's problems. Because the babysitter had a new phone, it didn't yet contain Balfour's office phone number, only her cell number, meaning that when the sitter phoned to wonder why Balfour hadn't dropped Bryce off that morning, it rang unheard in Balfour's purse.

The holes, all of them, aligned.

There is no consistent character profile of the parent who does this to his or her child. The 13 who were interviewed for this story include the introverted and extroverted; the sweet, the sullen, the stoic and the terribly fragile. None of those descriptions exactly fits Lyn Balfour, a 37-year-old Army reservist who has served in combat zones and who seems to remain – at least on the subject of the death of her son – in battle.

"I don't feel I need to forgive myself," she says, "because what I did was not intentional."

It had been Balfour's idea to go to the trial of Miles Harrison; it was she who walked up to Harrison in the hallway during a break, pushed past a crowd and threw her arms around his neck, pulling him close.

Balfour served in Bosnia and twice in Iraq, where she specialized in intelligence analysis and construction management and where she discovered a skill at juggling a dozen things at once. She won a Bronze Star for managing $47 million (U.S.) in projects without mislaying a penny. She got married, had a son, divorced, met Jarrett Balfour and within a month decided this handsome, younger man would be her husband. Eighteen months later, he was. Bryce was their first child together. Braiden, conceived with Jarrett's sperm when he was in Iraq, is their second. Today, in the same way, they're trying for a third.

Balfour stopped at the fertility clinic for her procedure and she's now driving to the JAG school, to demonstrate to a reporter where and how her son's death happened. Down the road to the right is where she dropped Jarrett off at work, which was not customary and which she theorizes put a subconscious check mark in her brain: Delivery made. Now she's pointing out the house of the babysitter she had driven obliviously past as she talked to her boss about a scheduling snafu and to her nephew about helping to pay his gambling debts. And here is the parking lot of the JAG school, on the University of Virginia campus. She's pulling into the same spot she was parked in that day, the place where Bryce died.

"It was like this, except these two spots next to us were empty," she notes blandly as she gets out of the car, gathers her keys and leans in to get the diaper bag.

There is an almost pugnacious matter-of-factness about Lyn Balfour that can seem disconcerting. Her eyes are impassive. Her attitude is clear:

You got a problem with that?

In some cases of infant hyperthermia in cars, there is a history of prior neglect or evidence of substance abuse. Sometimes, the parent knowingly left the child in the car, despite the obvious peril. In one particularly egregious instance, a mother used her locked car as an inexpensive substitute for daycare. When hyperthermia deaths are prosecuted, they tend to result in prison sentences.

Lyn Balfour was prosecuted. She was charged not with manslaughter but with second-degree murder, carrying a possible prison sentence of up to 40 years. And as a condition of remaining free on bond, the court prohibited her from being alone with any minors, including her teenage son.

So Balfour hired John Zwerling, a top-gun criminal defence lawyer. That meant that Jarrett Balfour, an employee of a civilian military contractor, took an assignment in Iraq. The extra combat pay was needed for legal expenses. Lyn Balfour would have to face this alone.

That is when she began to move past grief and guilt and paralyzing self-doubt to a very specific, very focused anger.

Zwerling's first task, he says, was to get the charge reduced to involuntary manslaughter. His second and more daunting job was to craft a defence for a case that was being prosecuted with what at times seemed like theatrical zeal.

He had to win jurors to Balfour's side without putting her personality on trial.

What Zwerling did was play two audiotapes for the jury. One was Balfour's interrogation by police in the hospital about an hour after Bryce's death; her answers are immeasurably sad, almost unintelligible, half sob, half whisper: "I killed my baby," she says tremulously. "Oh, God, I'm so sorry."

The second tape was a call to 911 made by a passerby, in those first few seconds after Balfour discovered the body and beseeched a stranger to summon help. Mostly, you hear a woman's voice, tense but precise, explaining to a police dispatcher what she is seeing. Initially, there's nothing in the background. Then Balfour howls at the top of her lungs, "OH, MY GOD, NOOOO!"

Then, for a few seconds, nothing. Then a deafening shriek: "NO, NO, PLEASE, NO!!!"

Three more seconds, then: "PLEASE, GOD, NO, PLEASE!!!"

What is happening is that Balfour is administering CPR. At that moment, she recalls, she felt like two people occupying one body: Lyn, the crisply efficient certified combat lifesaver, and Lyn, the incompetent mother who would never again know happiness.

Breathe, compress, breathe, compress. Each time that she came up for air, she lost it. Then, back to the patient.

After hearing this tape, the jury deliberated for all of 90 minutes, including time for lunch. The not-guilty verdict was unanimous.

There is no clearing house in the United States for cases of infant hyperthermia, no government agency charged with data collection and oversight. The closest thing is in the basement office of a comfortable home in suburban Kansas City, Kan., where a former sales and marketing executive named Janette Fennell runs a non-profit organization called Kids and Cars. Kids and Cars lobbies for increased car safety for children and as such maintains one of the saddest databases in America.

Fennell has met or talked with many of the parents in the hyperthermia cases and some now work with her organization.

"They tend to be the doting parents," she says, "the kind who buy baby locks and safety gates."

These cases, she says, are failures of memory, not of love.

The answer to the problem, Fennell believes, lies in improved car safety features and in increased public awareness that this can happen, that the results of a momentary lapse of memory can be horrifying.

Lyn Balfour's Ruckersville home is fragrant with spice candles and the faintly sweet feel of kitsch. Braiden boings happily in a baby bouncer, the same one Bryce had, and crawls on a patchwork comforter that had been Bryce's, too. As Balfour is text-messaging Jarrett in Iraq, she's checking out Braiden's diaper, multi-tasking as always.

She has carefully crafted the face she shows the world, she says.

"I would like to disappear, to move someplace where no one knows who I am and what I did. I would do that in a heartbeat but I can't. I have to say my name. I'm the lady who killed her child and I have to be that lady because I promised Bryce."

The promise, she says, came as she held her son's body in the hospital. "I kissed him for the last time and I told him how sorry I was and I said I would do everything in my power to make sure this will never happen to another child."

Balfour has done this in a way suited to her personality: she has become a modern, maternal version of the Ancient Mariner, from time to time brazenly bellying up to strangers in places such as Sam's Club and starting a conversation about children, so she can tell them what she did to one of hers.

An in-your-face cautionary tale.

Unlike most parents to whom this has happened, Balfour will talk to the media, anytime. She works with Kids and Cars, telling her story repeatedly.

Her point is always consistent, always resolute, always tinged with a little anger, always a little self-serving, sometimes a bit abrasive: This can happen to anyone. This is a mistake, not a crime, and should not be prosecuted. Cars need safety devices to prevent this.

"The truth is," she says, "the pain never gets less. It's never dulled. I just put it away for a while, until I'm in private."

On the floor, Braiden is entranced by an Elmo doll.

"Sometimes," Balfour says, "I wish I had died in childbirth with him..." She's weeping now. For the moment, there's no soldier left. "... that way, Jarrett could have Braiden and I could be with Bryce."

Miles Harrison is in a Starbucks, seated next to the condiment station, pulling napkin after napkin to dry his eyes.

"I hurt my wife so much," he says, "and by the grace of whatever wonderful quality is within her, she has forgiven me. And that makes me feel even worse. Because I can't forgive me."

Harrison is a Roman Catholic. Weeks after Chase's death, he returned to his local church, where priest and parishioners left him to grieve in solitude. Afterward, the priest embraced him and whispered in his ear: "I will always be here for you."

The priest was Father Michael Kelly. On New Year's Eve, on a windswept road after a heavy rain, as Father Michael stopped to move a tree that had fallen across the road, he was struck by another falling tree and killed.

Harrison doesn't know what to make of this; nothing entirely holds together anymore, except, to his astonishment, his marriage.

In their home, Carol and Miles Harrison have kept Chase's nursery exactly as it was and the child's photos are all over. "Sometimes, we'll look at a picture together," Harrison says, "and I will see Carol cry. She tries not to let me see but I see, and I feel such guilt and hurt."

Harrison says he knows it is unlikely he and Carol will be allowed to adopt again. He leans forward, his voice breaking into a sobbing falsetto. "I have cheated her out of being a mother. She would be the best mother in the world."

As part of her plan to simplify her life, Lyn Balfour has quit her job. It's going to get a little more complicated soon, because she's pregnant again. The insemination that she had on that day in October was successful. The baby is due in July.

"Can you imagine losing your only child and not having a hope of having another?" she says. "Can you imagine that despair?"

That's why she has made a decision. She has checked it out and it would be legal. There would be no way for any authority to stop it because it would fall into the class of a private adoption. She'd need a sperm donor and an egg donor, because she wouldn't want to use her own egg. That would make it too personal.

What is she saying, exactly?

Miles and Carol Harrison deserve another child, Balfour explains. They would be wonderful parents.

Balfour says she has made up her mind. If the Harrisons are denied another adoption, if they exhaust all their options and are still without a baby, she will offer to carry one for them, as a gift.

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E 1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com